1. Field
The present embodiments relate to techniques for generating a set of inter-related documents, and in particular, for generating a set of inter-related documents for use in testing network-related Internet technologies.
2. Related Art
Online products and services are increasingly popular. However, as networks, such as the Internet, become progressively more complicated, it is becoming more difficult for developers to ensure that new products and services, as well as revisions to existing products and services, operate correctly and are reliable. Consequently, realistic testing of these products and services prior to deployment is critical.
Existing techniques for testing network products and services often use real documents on the Internet (such as websites and web pages) or randomly generated documents (which mimic websites and web pages). However, actual websites and web pages are poorly controlled (for example, they may be regularly updated or changed), which makes it difficult to reproduce testing results during the development process. In addition, a very large number of randomly generated documents may need to be used in order to cover a representative range of variation in the documents. Consequently, randomly generated documents often require excessive amounts of memory. For example, during a cross-validation test, there may be millions of possible document combinations, which typically occupy a significant amount of memory, thereby increasing the testing cost and complexity.